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Comment by geerlingguy | Hacker News Reader

And yet, stocks continue their quick rebound.

Just wait until earnings come out, then we'll probably see a correction. A lot of this is probably driven by institutional rebalancing into broad market indexes, which pulls everything up.

The virus will peak soon, quarantine will start easing, and the economy will start to resume.

Why / how will the virus peak soon?

Global population is ~7.8 billion and yet presumably only 10-100s of millions have caught it so far.

At the rough 33% increase rate the virus is showing, 10 million is 20 in three days. 40 in 6. 80 in 9. 160 in 12.

Social distancing is slowing that down a bit, but I suspect in the coming week or two we'll learn it's been spreading like wildfire in places like Florida and Alabama where they've been slow to clamp down on social activity.

Exponential growth can be hard to wrap heads around. That said, I think "peak" is a misnomer. We'll have a bunch of peaks.

Definitely cyclical...and so will the economy which will make any economic recovery more drawn out and difficult as we experience more ups and downs in day to day life.

Plus now we'll have a bunch of companies on the dole who otherwise wouldn't be in business/re-open and it will become even more surreal when the market can't sort out which companies are existing naturally and which ones are fully propped up (esp. if there is no oversight = impossible to track).

Also, we're not even testing for it broadly enough to really know how many cases we have. Current numbers in the USA are a rough educated guess.

I am afraid the big hit will come in the second wave, when we get used to the numbers, get cabin fever, things start opening up and say 0.1% of people still have it, versus the one in a million that had it when things started shutting down.

When the contagion is out in 0.1%, and we reopen everything, suddenly 50% of people will have it in a month and that will be unlike anything we've seen yet.

"I am afraid the big hit will come in the second wave" Quite possible, yes, but do not live in fear, friend. This is a great time to eradicate fear and embrace the chaos :)

Now we're asking the real questions! But what facet of Chaos are we to embrace? The undivided power of it? Or to pray to one of the gods and seek their favor? Grandfather Nurgle may be good now, but in 6 months the skull throne may need skulls. Slaneesh seems to have been usurped recently.

Was this intended as a response to something else?

https://warhammerfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Chaos

We're already starting to see massive layoffs at startups. Maybe it was possible that every restaurant could just rehire their unemployed staff (extremely unlikely), but once salaried employees are let go it's a long time before companies start rehiring.

Even if covid-19 disappeared today in some impossible miracle, we'd still see record people out of work and it would take years to fully recover.

The "startup" phase of private industry has flourished by unprecedented amounts of VC over the past 5+ years. VC, in turn, has been backed by record PE levels and exits.

Does anyone think these $ highs are coming back in the next 2-3 years, minimum, maybe 5+ ?

Full circle, startup capitalization has peaked

Why would we open the economy at "peak"? We need to wait at bare minimum until contagion goes back down below the level it was when we shut the economy down. That's a couple months off I'd imagine, and even then we'll just have to shut it back down again shortly after, once the contagion gets back up to the level where we shut the economy down initially.

It's a tug of war between two camps:

1. The virus has peaked, we'll start to see global economies open up again, everything will be back to normal soon

2. There will continue to be lots of peaks all around the world for months/years to come, the economy will not resume like it was before, for many years.

Personally I think things will be stagnating for a while until we get a therapeutic or a vaccine.

LOL, what did you expect? Bernie dropped out, unemployment numbers are up, Trump fired the person responsible for managing the 2 trillion Coronavirus bailout. This is a great time for business, not so much for people.

If no one has any money to buy anything, that is bad for business.

On the contrary: some business focus on luxury markets, other force people to buy on credit and then demand interest.

Perhaps they've gotten rid of the bottleneck in capitalism: customers. If the government will pay instead, it's much easier to start afloat. No product required!